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Popular perceptions of Soviet politics

in the 1920s. Disenchantment of the
dreamers
a
Stephen White
a
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
Published online: 16 Mar 2015.

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To cite this article: Stephen White (2015) Popular perceptions of Soviet politics in the 1920s.
Disenchantment of the dreamers, Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity,
43:3, 530-531, DOI: 10.1080/00905992.2015.1010700

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 530 Book Reviews

Popular perceptions of Soviet politics in the 1920s. Disenchantment of the dreamers,

by Olga Velikanova, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 251 pp., $100 (hardcover), ISBN
978-1-137-03074-0

This engaging study has its origins in the years in which its author worked as a guide at the
Museum of the Revolution in what is now St. Petersburg, not only lecturing groups of visi-
tors but also responding to all kinds of questions. She enrolled in the Ph.D. program at
Leningrad State University at the end of the 1980s and started to work in the Russian
archives. Her big break came in September 1991, in the aftermath of the collapse of the
attempted coup, when the staff of the Leningrad party archive, without waiting for instruc-
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tions from above, began to hand out material that had been unavailable for decades. She felt
“like Ali Baba in the cave full of treasures” (2).
Many years later, this book is her result: a richly detailed, archivally based study of
popular opinion in the early Soviet years, with a particular focus on a series of episodes
including the war scares of the mid-1920s and the 10th anniversary of the October Revolu-
tion in 1927 (another focus, the Peasants’ Union Movement, appears a little detached and
indeed has already appeared elsewhere). A special feature is the inclusion of a small number
of interesting and unfamiliar photographs from the St. Petersburg state archives.
Reconstructing public attitudes many years later is, of course, a problematic exercise,
and one that has been extensively debated in relation to the Stalin period and the extent to
which secret police reports provide a useful account of the popular sentiments of the
time. The bodies that collected this kind of information might have had all kinds of
reasons to exaggerate or minimize its importance. Ordinary people were understandably
confused by the changes through which they were living: many relied on rumors, and
tried to make sense of their experience by locating them within familiar political or reli-
gious frameworks. And moods themselves were fluid, even at the level of the same
individuals.
The sources used in this study are mostly svodki – regular reports of the Soviet secret
police and the Communist Party on the political mood and sentiments of the citizens,
together with private correspondence secretly intercepted by the police and letters to news-
papers and authorities. These, of course, were documents prepared for particular purposes
by officials with interests to protect, who were keen to demonstrate their personal loyalty
and the effectiveness of their organization. The author’s response is what others might
call triangulation: reports of this kind are considered alongside other bodies of evidence pre-
pared by officials with different institutional affiliations and in conjunction with personal
documents and “letters to power” of various kinds, even the reports of foreign diplomats.
All of this, Velikanova argues, allows us to make “cautious generalizations” (18) based
on the frequency of various narratives in different kinds of sources.
These various sources are employed to consider, first of all, the “foreign threat” in
1923–1924 and then the more familiar “war scare” of 1927. Younger workers, it appeared,
were often ready to take what they had read in the regime-sponsored press at face value;
older workers were more skeptical; and the countryside as a whole was more inclined to
trust rumors than printed sources of any kind (only about half of them were literate and
even fewer understood the Bolsheviks’ new language, including terms such as “occu-
pation” or “memorandum”) (32–33). Some were even hopeful that “Grand Duke Nikolai
Nikolaevich [would] come soon to liberate Siberia from the Communists,” or that one of
the Western powers might do so; the regime itself worried that a foreign incursion might
precipitate a peasants’ revolt (35), and “rank-and-file Communists and even military
 Nationalities Papers 531

commanders were gripped by panic after Lenin’s death” (36). A particular concern was the
possibility of a poison gas attack, launched from the air.
By 1927, and the 10th anniversary of the Revolution, the popular mood was a more
somber one. The building of socialism, complained one of Krest’ianskaia gazeta’s corre-
spondents, seemed to be like the “Great Wall of China, which took a lot of energy, but
made little sense” (160). Initially, there had been great hopes of a new and more equal
society, but now there was an atmosphere of pessimism and disillusion. Socialism was
the most important question before them, wrote another group of peasants, “but no one
in the villages explained it clearly and convincingly, and the general population doesn’t
even have a vague idea about it” (165). The privileges that were enjoyed by party
members and industrial workers were a particular source of resentment. “The USSR is a
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country of privileges – much more than Russia was,” complained another correspondent;
“Communists have a lot of advantages.” But workers themselves were also dissatisfied:
they had “fought not to go barefoot and hungry, but to be clothed and fed,” grumbled a
Leningrad proletarian (167).
In a study that places so much emphasis on the specific, it may be unreasonable to seek
large-scale generalizations. All the same, Velikanova can convincingly argue that popular
opinion was one of the elements that shaped the politics of the period, and that the extent of
dissent that is documented in this study is greater than what the literature has so far
acknowledged. By the end of the 1920s, she argues, the Bolsheviks had “dismally failed
to reach a national consensus;” indeed, there was a “legitimacy crisis” that led directly to
the imposition of the “dictatorial methods that characterized mature Stalinism” (192).
Whether or not they think the evidence allows us to be taken so far, all students of the
period will wish to consider this richly documented study and it will make a substantial con-
tribution to the ongoing construction of a more adequate history “from below” of this period
and those that have followed it.

Stephen White
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
s.white@socsci.gla.ac.uk
© 2015, Stephen White
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2015.1010700